What to do with nine external drives, many of them unused?

[designs216]

This would be separate from the day-to-day requirements for a reasonably fast, 2.5" storage, right?

Does TM support backing up to 2 different hard drives? I was told it didn't. Knowing me, this would however be just another regular requirement to take a drive offsite, and exchange it with the local one every... week? I believe the offsite drive also needs to be kept separate from the computer, in case my bag gets stolen?

I was thinking something along the lines of this, allowing you to just swap the drive every other day. If you don't think you'll remember to swap the drives, the current edition of TimeMachine can indeed alternate backing up between multiple separate HDDs.

You can leave the offsite drive in a static free bag at your relative's house or even better in a safe deposit box.

 

[Cubytus]

Ok, so this kind of setup would require Montain Lion. I don't have it, and I am not willing to change my current Snow Leopard yet.

Besides, I don't visit any "relative's house" regularly by any means, and I am still unwilling to pay $50 a month for a safety deposit box in a bank that would add yet another constraint, to be present during bank business hours (which are already very reduced compared to classic business hours).

Thanks for the tip, but this suggestion would add too much constraints, although I acknowledge it makes sense in an ideal world.

 

[InuNacho]

I got an old 120GB FW400 drive that I store bootable OS X partitions on in case of emergency. You could easily do that with your 250GB one.

 

[Cubytus]

Already doing it

I haven't said so, but the current G-Technology has a bootable Carbon Copy Cloner clone of the current OS (Minus data). Awkward to set up since I am not sure what part of ~/Library could be safely let out (older CCC version is hard to configure properly, and once set, can't be edited), but if I am near the Time Machine backup AND have the bootable clone handy, I can recover from an internal HDD breakage in less than 30 minutes. Obviously this has the persistent issue that, if this occurs while I am away from the TM backup, it may take more than 30 minutes to recover since my offsite backup, SpiderOak, isn't reliable when it comes to download, plus I would have to find a wifi access point.

On the other hand, I can't reasonable have both the virtual machines-holding external drive AND the Time Machine + bootable partition drive at the same time on the road. Both require fast connections, sure, but virtual machines take a great deal of space, so as Time Machine, but mustn't run at the same time (TM being automated), for performance reason. I have yet to find a drive fast and large enough to serve all these functions together while remaining in a 2.5" format. Even the seek time on a 2.5" Thunderbolt rotating drive serving these application will slow it down considerably, I believe.

Since backing up all data both on and offsite isn't feasible, I opted for no backup for easily replaceable data (Movies), single backup for not-so-important data (e.g. Music files), on-site and remote backup for personal files (courses, bills, etc), and triple backup for mission-critical data (current academic projects, lab data), the third one being a sufficiently large USB key left wherever I happen to work most often. The only weak link here is the buggy SpiderOak client.

My first post question needs to take into account the backup model I want to implement. No easy task to cater for so many variables.